Branding and Building Brand Identity

Why do consumers choose your company’s products or services over the competition? Chances are it’s your branding—your name, reputation, personality, and what you stand for—that sets you apart. Get expert ideas and survey templates to help build your brand.

How marketers use brand research surveys

As a marketing professional, you’re getting new ways to measure what’s going on with your business every day. From census data to web analytics to revenue numbers, you probably already know a great deal about your customers – but that’s just implicit data you’re collecting. The implicit data you collect can tell you how customers behave, but you don’t get the why behind the numbers – or a full understanding of the customer experience.

So, although you may be able to quickly see the sales lift from an ad spend, how do you know whether a campaign changes the way people think about your company? Or what your customers think about your competitors? Or whether existing customers trust you more or less than they used to?

Smart marketers use online branding surveys to determine their brand power – which is your brand’s value as determined by consumers’ positive or negative attitudes about your brand.

According to our research, 80% of marketers believe that building brand awareness is extremely or very important – but 76% admit they don’t know what percentage of their target market is aware of their brand. Here’s how you can use branding surveys to find out whether potential customers think of you first – and how they view your brand.

Improve your brand power

How do you get consumers to recognize you—and to recommend your product or service to others? Through helping people conduct market research every day, we’ve learned a lot about how to improving the strength of your brand identity (especially through surveys).

Measure brand awareness and recognition

Is your brand on consumers’ minds when they’re looking to make a purchase? When you know how visible (or invisible) you are to consumers, you’ll understand how strong your brand is in your market segment and whether you need to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. Ask survey questions that test for brand recall – your consumers’ ability to name your brand on their own to see whether they’re thinking about you (or your competitors) first.

For example, ask an open-ended question such as “When you think of online streaming video services, which brands come to mind?”

To measure brand recognition, which is consumers’ ability to recognise your brand among a list of the others in your category, ask a closed-ended question such as “Which of the following brands have you heard of? (Select all that apply.)” Make sure that you include your brand name along with the names of other big brands in the list of answer choices.

Determine your brand attributes

It’s one thing for consumers to be aware of your brand – but knowing what they think of your brand category (or which brand attributes or characteristics they associate with it) is just as important. If your market is bottled water, for example, which brands within that category come to mind for most people? And what are the good, bad and even ugly traits that people associate with bottled water?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can shape your brand image to combat negative attributes and play up the positive ones. Start gathering these details by asking questions about your brand category – and by asking people to assign characteristics to your brand.

Understand customer loyalty

When your customers have the opportunity to go with another brand and they continue to choose yours – well, that’s brand loyalty. A great way to measure customer loyalty is to use the Net Promoter® Score (NPS), the standard companies around the world use to see whether customers are recommending them to others.

Event Surveys

Organising an event is by no means easy. Who’s coming? What’s their schedule like? Event surveys can give you a clearer picture. When you’ve finished, receive post-event feedback so that you can improve for next time.